Electronic spamming is the use of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited or unwanted messages, or “spam.” The act of spamming can be economically viable to spammers because of the low operating costs as well as the difficulty to hold spammers accountable for their activities. The costs, such as pollution of the user experience, lost productivity, and fraud, are borne by service providers and ultimately by end users.
Some content sharing services are uniquely affected by spam in that spammers may directly interact with users via usernames or handles that are readily available and accessible. For example, spammers who use Twitter® can spam users by replying to a “Tweet®” that a user posts, by including usernames in a Tweet® that the spammers themselves post, and/or by direct message. Further, spammers have access to histories or streams of users' posts. The problem may be exacerbated when a content sharing service opens its application programming interface (API) to developers. Additionally, because of the real-time content creation and consumption nature of some content sharing services, an anti-spam system must be able to react with lower latency and at scale to be effective.